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j. Magazine Title Offends Survivors

Holocaust survivors have taken umbrage with the retitling of San Francisco’s Jewish Bulltein to j. Magazine.

Polly Bergtraun, a child survivor of the Holocaust, fired off an indignant e-mail to the editor. “What ‘j’ means to me and all other survivors of the Nazi regime and their occupation, is that this letter on our passports, identification documents and stars meant that we were Jews and doomed for destruction.”

By changing the name to something less overtly Jewish, the publishers hope to attract a younger readership. Yeah, good luck there. Guess you can’t make everyone happy.

3 thoughts on “j. Magazine Title Offends Survivors

  1. Come on, this is madness, there is nothing wrong with calling it J.
    Also, it is about being proud of who you are and your roots.
    I really get sick and tired of us being seen as victims and yes, we have been victims in the past and will never forget it, but we need to move on.

  2. hey, i’m pretty sick of this too…
    • In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him “a dirty Jew.”
    • Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapon fire.
    • In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack.
    • Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza “should be shot dead.”
    • A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.
    • “Anti-Semitism”, wrote a! columnist in The Spectator, “has become respectable . . . at London dinner tables.” She quoted one member of the House of Lords: “The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”
    • In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again?”
    • In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher. The caption:”Non resurrexit.”
    • In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: “Six million were not enough.”
    • In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed t! he windows of Kiev’s main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
    • In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Loannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.
    • In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of “Sieg Heil” and “Jews into the sea.”
    • In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
    • In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words “Dirty Jew” were painted.
    • In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervill! iers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.
    • According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming “Jews to the gas chambers” and “Death to the Jews.”
    • The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve “family honor.”
    • The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked — and did not apologize — when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world’s troubles were the fault of “…that shitty little country, Israel.”
    • A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France. The woman was p! regnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France. This was in the past week.
    • According to the Anti-Defamation League, from September 9, 2000, at the start of the intifada, through November 20, 2001, there were some 330 acts of anti-Semitism just in and around Paris. In addition to literally scores of firebombing of synagogues, just before Rosh Hashanah, 200 Arabs attacked Jews on the Champs Elysees. The pace has only picked up since then.
    • In December, a French cinema in Paris refused to allow a Hanukah showing of Harry Potter to 800 Jewish children because of French-Palestinian threats (the threats were confirmed by French police who then went on to do nothing, not even giving details). It was one incident in an eventful month when synagogues continued to be firebombed and a Jewish kindergarten was vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti and set ablaze.
    • The Malaysian PM says “Jews run the world”.
    • A major donor of a Georgia congressman seeking reelection referred to the congressman’s opponent as “that Jew boy down in Savannah” from the podium at a recent fundraiser.
    • “Demeza Delhomme, 55, a four-year [Spring Valley] village trustee and the Democratic candidate for the District 13 County Legislature seat, said on his cable access show that all Jews have food stamps and are on Section 8, a federal housing-subsidy program”.
    • Greg Easterbrook, a senior editor at The National Review says in a column that Jewish executives “worship money above all else”.
    • A recent poll says “Russians believe that the two most prominent characteristics of Jews are slyness and stinginess, nearly half (46 percent) would disapprove of a close relative marrying a Jew, and only 1 percent express admiration for Jews.”
    • Antisemitic literature is cropping up on people’s front lawns in all parts of the country—last week in Massachussetts and Wednesday in Missouri.
    • “Fliers in Germany blamed Jews for contaminating a lake near Berlin and the trees around it.”
    • Pro-Palestinian students at the University College Cork in Ireland are keeping a list of nearly 150 American Jews in what some are referring to as an “Internet version of the Nazi yellow star.”
    • “A Jewish cemetery in Germany was desecrated. Swastikas and anti-Jewish statements were spray painted on gravestones this week in a cemetery in Beeskow.”
    • A Holocaust memorial was also desecrated in Germany last month.
    • Last month, vandals attacked a Holocaust memorial in Belarus.
    • A sukkah erected in observance of Sukkot at Toronto’s York University was destroyed by vandals in what campus officials describe as a hate crime.
    • Last month an arsonist burned a San Diego synagogue to the ground.
    • On Erev Yom Kippur an arsonist set ablaze the homes of several Hasidic families in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
    •: Two Jews were beaten to death in Russia within the last month.

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